Mobile broadband traffic is expected to grow exponentially. The next generation ubiquitous, ultra-high-bandwidth communication system, also known as 5G, will involve network densification to meet the throughput and latency demands that are likely to arise in the future. In 5G communication systems, small cells are expected to carry the majority of traffic. This will generally result in a significant increase in the number of cell sites. In fact, it is expected that positioning of those cell sites in 5G small cell networks can become critical since 5G signals are very strongly affected by clutter (building, trees) as well as small-scale terrain variation.
The high density areas of 5G sites will represent a significant expansion for an operator with a 2G, 3G or 4G network. It may not be possible to use traditional cell towers with fiber optic cable backhaul for every site. Instead of using traditional cell towers, multiple non-traditional sites will be required to provide coverage. Consequently, small cell deployment will become one of the biggest challenges for mobile operators due to the order of magnitude increase in number of sites as compared to the traditional macro cell deployment.
Current telecom networks are based on an architectural model of three classes of network domains: core, metro, and access. A traditional access network design involves an engineer developing a network plan based on modeled coverage from a set of chosen sites. That plan is then given to a site acquisition team. This team negotiates installation rights and determines needs of backhaul to the sites. If a particular site is not available, then a notice (or some other notification) is given back to the planning team. Consequently, in a series of meetings a new proposal is generated. When this process becomes too cumbersome, the site acquisition team may substitute nearby sites for the ones requested in the plan. As another example, a site installation team may move the planned location within the site to enable backhaul, power or accessibility.
This method has some critical challenges in development of an improved 5G communication system. Many of the small non-traditional sites may not be available, or if available may typically have insufficient backhaul. The last hop backhaul for 5G small cells typically should enable a cost-effective deployment in a flexible, organic way, where additional capacity can be injected as required. The backhaul has to meet all the key 5G backhaul requirements such as providing multi-gigabit throughput, having millisecond level of maximum latency, having high availability and reliability, having cost-effective scalability, being easy to deploy, being easy to manage, having dynamic expandability and optimization based on traffic, having a small form factor, and having low TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). Thus, in some cases, hundreds of re-plans may be required to cover a significant market. Furthermore, because of the strong effect of clutter on a 5G signal, a nearby network site location may be a poor substitute for an originally-proposed network site location.
This manual process of network site selection is normally very time consuming and typically requires multiple adaptations. Accordingly, there is a need for an improved automatic method of network planning.